Earthquake is one of the most serious natural disasters on the earth. Every time a strong earthquake occurs, inestimably huge losses and casualties will be caused to humans and the nature. Although it is almost impossible to predict an earthquake, the longest escape time can be obtained if an earthquake alert can be issued in the shortest time after the occurrence of the earthquake.
As technology advances, people have reached a high level in recording and detecting earthquakes in recent years, and construction techniques relevant to earthquake alert systems are also increasingly mature, e.g., Earthquake Early Warning (EEW). Most countries in seismic zones nowadays have a sufficiently large scale of earthquake alert systems in order to reduce the loss to the greatest extent at the arrival of the natural disasters. The general earthquake alert systems utilize more than three earthquake detecting stations to detect the arrival time of earthquake waves when the earthquake occurs, and accordingly infer the time of the earthquake occurrences and an epicenter position.
However, the erection of the earthquake detecting stations is highly demanding on environmental conditions, and the earthquake detecting stations are hardly fault tolerant for interferences, for example, caused by the passing by of trains, trucks or wild animals. As a result, the earthquake detecting stations can only be erected in locations with less environmental interferences. In this case, it is almost impossible to erect the earthquake detecting stations near the center of a densely populated city, hence making it almost impossible to issue an alert immediately at the occurrence of an earthquake of which the epicenter is near the center of the city, because it would already be too late when the earthquake is detected by the earthquake detecting stations that are far away from the epicenter.
Moreover, a certain degree of density of earthquake detecting stations is required in order to improve the epicenter positioning accuracy of the earthquake alert system. However, the cost of erecting an earthquake detecting station is very high, so a considerably high construction cost is inevitable when increasing the density of the earthquake detecting stations to improve the epicenter positioning accuracy.
Accordingly, there is an urgent need in the art to provide an earthquake detecting mechanism that is able to shorten the time for earthquake detections and to provide an instant alert with minimum construction cost.